In a meeting in Paris last week, President François Hollande of France and President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico pledged to move their countries’ battered bilateral relationship beyond the controversial case of Florence Cassez, a French citizen imprisoned in Mexico, with Peña Nieto promising to respect the Mexican Supreme Court’s ruling on the case. In an email interview, Roberto Domínguez, a Jean Monnet researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, discussed France-Mexico relations.*
WPR: How extensive are relations between France and Mexico in terms of trade and diplomatic ties?
Roberto Domínguez: Relations between France and Mexico take place against the backdrop of the European Union-Mexico relationship. Although an EU-Mexico free trade agreement has been in place since 2000, Mexico is only the EU’s 20th-largest trade partner, representing 1.2 percent of total EU trade, while the EU is Mexico’s third-largest, representing 7.9 percent of total Mexican trade. From a political standpoint, Mexico and Brazil are the EU’s strategic partners in Latin America. For France in particular, Mexico is the 41st-largest destination of French exports and the 50th-largest source of imports. Diplomatically, Mexico and France share views on a variety of topics of the international agenda, particularly on reinforcing multilateralism.